Monday, 11 January 2010
CURRENT EVENTS: 01/11/10
Wow. It's only been 7 years since the first Spider-Man movie: we need a reboot already? Hollywood, heal thyself.
UNCHAIN MY CAMERA
Once upon a time, back when cinema was but a newborn medium, many things we take for granted today in movies didn’t exist, hadn’t been thought up yet, or were beyond the technological capability of the time. As a result, the older the movie, the more likely it is for modern audiences to be taken out of the experience, or simply not get quite what’s so special.
It wasn’t until nearly the end of the silent era that equipment, film stock, and such evolved to the point where the occasional movie that still “looks right” to the modern eye would come out. The Soviets, led by Eisenstein, pioneered most of the advances that make up what we now know as film editing, but still, many of the compositions were static; most directors either had to or thought they had to plunk their camera down on sticks and shoot whatever happened to be in front of the lens. That is, until a six-foot-eleven German maniac named Fredrich Wilhelm Murnau decided to put his camera in motion. With his “Unchained Camera Technique,” flashy camerawork was born.
Coming out of 1920’s Berlin’s prolific and enormously influential UFA studios, Murnau honed his craft working in the dominant Expressionist mode of the era. His first breakthrough was 1922’s Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel Dracula; Stoker’s estate sued Murnau, won, and ordered every print of the film destroyed. Were it not for some quick-thinking cineastes, who protected as many prints as they could, Nosferatu would have been lost forever (and we never would have gotten the chance to see John Malkovich play Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire, one of the great underrated classics of the last 15 years).
Following the artistic—if not commercial—success of Nosferatu, Murnau began work on Der Letzte Mann (1924), a story about a hotel doorman who, upon losing his job, loses his sense of meaning in life. In many ways, Der Letzte Mann was the first truly modern movie; it was one of the only silent movies to have no title cards, but more importantly, instead of the camera sitting and observing action as though it was taking place on a stage, Murnau used the medium of cinema as his primary tool for advancing the narrative. He introduced the idea of subjective camera, where the audience sees through a character’s eyes. He put his director of photography, Karl Freund, in a wheelchair and wheeled him back and forth, in so doing inventing the tracking shot. He employed tilts, pans, and zooms, which were rare if even extant.
These stylistic innovations are the primary point of interest in the movie. The narrative, following a series of setbacks suffered by Emil Jannings’ prideful doorman, starting with his beloved, brass-buttoned uniform being taken away when he is demoted to the position of washroom attendant due to his age, is simple, and by the end incredibly bleak and depressing. In a controversial move, Der Letzte Mann’s American distributor asked Murnau to reshoot the ending to appeal to American audiences (in the process giving it the English title The Last Laugh, where the original German title translates to “the last man.” Slight difference . . .) Murnau, pissed, shot what he thought was the stupidest, cheesiest ending he could in an attempt to sabotage the distributor’s commercially-minded thinking, and, his contempt rising from the screen like steam, inserted the movie’s only title card:
The American ending sees Jannings inheriting a shitload of money from a random, convenient death of a heretofore unknown rich uncle (or something). He goes back to his hotel and his old neighborhood and everyone’s happy to see him. For some reason. In spite of the ending’s (deliberately) jarring tonal shift from the rest of the movie, American audiences liked it, and the movie was enough of a hit that 20th Century Fox brought Murnau to California to make a movie, which ended up being Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
Sunrise, with Murnau having few limits on budget and enjoying almost complete creative control, ended up being one of the last great masterpieces of the silent cinema (along with von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York), and so visually stunning that it would be almost 20 years before the industry adjusted enough to sound to catch up to Murnau’s camera mastery.
A deceptively simple narrative about a Woman From the City who seduces a Man from the country and compels him to attempt to murder the Woman he’s married to—these names are the only ones they’re given in the credits—Sunrise manages to make a fairly eloquent statement on the uneasy shift from a rural to an urban world (still a big deal in 1927, whereas 80+ years later, the shift long since complete, we regard it as a given). It is also a deeply moving love story, made such by its brilliant cast. Maybe it’s because, having grown up with talkies, I think of acting without talking as being prohibitively difficult, but I’m blown away by the performances George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, and Margaret Livingston give. The ending, thanks to the early sound-on-film technique Murnau used—score and limited sound effects only—is one of the first on record where the hero kisses the heroine as the music swells, but dissolving into the rising sun instead of to black lifts the audience up into the heavens, feeling more like an ascension than an ending.
Murnau died far too young, at 42 in a car crash. One wonders what kind of work he still had in him; though one of the great geniuses of the silent era, Murnau hated talkies, considering them impure as cinema, and we’ll never know whether he would have eventually made one, embracing sound as a new artistic challenge, or stubbornly remained thinking of cinema as a purely visual medium.
What we do know is that every time you’re watching a movie, and you see a shot with a moving camera—any type of camera movement at all—F.W. Murnau gets a couple bucks in karmic residuals. Yes, he’s that important. And, best of all, his films don’t feel to a modern audience like you’re eating vegetables, either, they feel like movies. In the silent era, pretty much only Keaton and Chaplin aged as well, and Murnau was the only one of the three who managed to be entertaining without comedy. Long may he reign.
It wasn’t until nearly the end of the silent era that equipment, film stock, and such evolved to the point where the occasional movie that still “looks right” to the modern eye would come out. The Soviets, led by Eisenstein, pioneered most of the advances that make up what we now know as film editing, but still, many of the compositions were static; most directors either had to or thought they had to plunk their camera down on sticks and shoot whatever happened to be in front of the lens. That is, until a six-foot-eleven German maniac named Fredrich Wilhelm Murnau decided to put his camera in motion. With his “Unchained Camera Technique,” flashy camerawork was born.
Coming out of 1920’s Berlin’s prolific and enormously influential UFA studios, Murnau honed his craft working in the dominant Expressionist mode of the era. His first breakthrough was 1922’s Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel Dracula; Stoker’s estate sued Murnau, won, and ordered every print of the film destroyed. Were it not for some quick-thinking cineastes, who protected as many prints as they could, Nosferatu would have been lost forever (and we never would have gotten the chance to see John Malkovich play Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire, one of the great underrated classics of the last 15 years).Following the artistic—if not commercial—success of Nosferatu, Murnau began work on Der Letzte Mann (1924), a story about a hotel doorman who, upon losing his job, loses his sense of meaning in life. In many ways, Der Letzte Mann was the first truly modern movie; it was one of the only silent movies to have no title cards, but more importantly, instead of the camera sitting and observing action as though it was taking place on a stage, Murnau used the medium of cinema as his primary tool for advancing the narrative. He introduced the idea of subjective camera, where the audience sees through a character’s eyes. He put his director of photography, Karl Freund, in a wheelchair and wheeled him back and forth, in so doing inventing the tracking shot. He employed tilts, pans, and zooms, which were rare if even extant.
These stylistic innovations are the primary point of interest in the movie. The narrative, following a series of setbacks suffered by Emil Jannings’ prideful doorman, starting with his beloved, brass-buttoned uniform being taken away when he is demoted to the position of washroom attendant due to his age, is simple, and by the end incredibly bleak and depressing. In a controversial move, Der Letzte Mann’s American distributor asked Murnau to reshoot the ending to appeal to American audiences (in the process giving it the English title The Last Laugh, where the original German title translates to “the last man.” Slight difference . . .) Murnau, pissed, shot what he thought was the stupidest, cheesiest ending he could in an attempt to sabotage the distributor’s commercially-minded thinking, and, his contempt rising from the screen like steam, inserted the movie’s only title card:
“Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would
have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has
provided a quite improbable epilogue.”
The American ending sees Jannings inheriting a shitload of money from a random, convenient death of a heretofore unknown rich uncle (or something). He goes back to his hotel and his old neighborhood and everyone’s happy to see him. For some reason. In spite of the ending’s (deliberately) jarring tonal shift from the rest of the movie, American audiences liked it, and the movie was enough of a hit that 20th Century Fox brought Murnau to California to make a movie, which ended up being Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
Sunrise, with Murnau having few limits on budget and enjoying almost complete creative control, ended up being one of the last great masterpieces of the silent cinema (along with von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York), and so visually stunning that it would be almost 20 years before the industry adjusted enough to sound to catch up to Murnau’s camera mastery.
A deceptively simple narrative about a Woman From the City who seduces a Man from the country and compels him to attempt to murder the Woman he’s married to—these names are the only ones they’re given in the credits—Sunrise manages to make a fairly eloquent statement on the uneasy shift from a rural to an urban world (still a big deal in 1927, whereas 80+ years later, the shift long since complete, we regard it as a given). It is also a deeply moving love story, made such by its brilliant cast. Maybe it’s because, having grown up with talkies, I think of acting without talking as being prohibitively difficult, but I’m blown away by the performances George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, and Margaret Livingston give. The ending, thanks to the early sound-on-film technique Murnau used—score and limited sound effects only—is one of the first on record where the hero kisses the heroine as the music swells, but dissolving into the rising sun instead of to black lifts the audience up into the heavens, feeling more like an ascension than an ending.
Murnau died far too young, at 42 in a car crash. One wonders what kind of work he still had in him; though one of the great geniuses of the silent era, Murnau hated talkies, considering them impure as cinema, and we’ll never know whether he would have eventually made one, embracing sound as a new artistic challenge, or stubbornly remained thinking of cinema as a purely visual medium.
What we do know is that every time you’re watching a movie, and you see a shot with a moving camera—any type of camera movement at all—F.W. Murnau gets a couple bucks in karmic residuals. Yes, he’s that important. And, best of all, his films don’t feel to a modern audience like you’re eating vegetables, either, they feel like movies. In the silent era, pretty much only Keaton and Chaplin aged as well, and Murnau was the only one of the three who managed to be entertaining without comedy. Long may he reign.
Friday, 8 January 2010
THE FIVE WORST DATE MOVIES (BY WHICH I MEAN SIX)
In honor of Friday night, as I sit comfortably at home listening to Englishmen with drug problems doing wondrous things to guitars, the topic of date movies presents itself. The boilerplate for this murkily defined genre—stories about people in love that make girls cry and squeeze their boyfriend’s hand—is not my main area of expertise. Most of the women I hang around with want to go see the same kind of movies I do: the kind with explosions and people killing shit. This goes for the gay men I know too—my closest friend of whom is a fellow Tony Scott disciple and makes fun of me for knowing more about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis than he does.
So why am I—uniquely unqualified to discuss a normal date not only due to the above-mentioned circumstances but also my emotionally remote, self-conscious nature—talking about date movies? Because I’m talking about the worst ones. I’m talking about movies that couldn’t get you laid in a thousand years. I’m talking about movies that if you watch them at home on DVD while fucking will inspire your partner to ceasefire immediately and leave. That will cause fights. That will just make you feel ooky.
Before getting to the list proper, a couple surprise omissions:
Schindler’s List (dir. Steven Spielberg)—1993
Would be number one, but Jerry Seinfeld hooked up to it once. Sure, he and the chick he hooked up with weren’t watching it, but still. Disqualification’s a disqualification.
Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven)—1990
I hooked up to this movie once. I am, of course, a god.
* * * *
So now, the list proper:
(5) Chasing Amy (dir. Kevin Smith)—1997
This came out (ba dump bump) the middle of my freshman year at Bard College, a place where the fine tradition of collegiate lesbianism was (and, I presume, still is) devoutly observed. In spite of writer-director Kevin Smith’s best efforts, the sisters were not amused. Two of same, a couple with whom I was friendly, asked me whether I thought Chasing Amy was worth seeing. I thought about it for a second—I knew it was a really bad idea, but I’ve got troll blood pumping through my veins—and told them sure, all the controversy was just Harvey Weinstein publicity. Fast-forward to a few hours later: I’ve turned in early (in retrospect, a sign something was seriously wrong) and just fallen asleep when BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “DANNY, I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!” Apparently, the movie disturbed the two of them so much that they almost broke up three times in the car on the way home (once when one of them blamed the other for “her friend”—me—playing such a horrible prank on them, the second when the other blamed the first for being friends with me, and the third just because they were being emotional) and wanted to lecture me about how horrible and homophobic the movie was, and how men may not understand this but lesbians do not have any interest in men! Harrumph! (Postscript: one of them is now married to a man). So yeah.
Lest we assume from that anecdote that only lesbian couples will react this badly to Chasing Amy, an apparently straight woman I watched it with later told me as she rolled her eyes “you only like this because it’s about lesbians . . . god, men are all alike.” Steer clear. It also hasn't aged very well.
(4) The Hunt For Red October (dir. John McTiernan)—1990
This one’s strictly speculative, and it’s admittedly standing in for a litany of—for the purposes under discussion—interchangeable military-themed pictures, and this one wins the prize for being one of my favorites. But I can’t imagine being sober and/or remotely giving a shit and suggesting to a date that we watch this. Unless there’s some girl out there who gets all squirmy at the sound of James Earl Jones saying, “Now understand, the torpedo did not detonate, you heard it hit the hull. And I . . . was never here.” (If you do, e-mail me). The exquisite pleasures of watching fiercely intelligent men match wits, maverick Soviet sub captains evading capture and certain death from all sides, callow young CIA analysts struggling to earn the trust of veteran military men, and ultimately basking quietly in a shared victory are in completely separate categories from the exquisite pleasures of taking women to bed. Do not mix.
(3) Sid and Nancy (dir. Alex Cox)—1986
As with (4), this one is standing in for any number of movies with a similar problem, but this goes one higher on the list because while gay military nerds might get simultaneous boners to all the talk about Crazy Ivans and so forth, watching a couple get so fucked up on drugs that the guy fatally stabs the girl is not getting anyone hot. Not to mention, Pistols purists occasionally gripe about the liberties Alex Cox took with the historical record in favor of hallucinatory visuals and general narrative drive, so try and seduce them some other way. Still, that caveat aside, it’s a great movie, and endlessly quotable, but when one of the best quotes is “None of us fuck, see? Sex is ugly,” it’s maybe kind of sort just slightly advisable to not try and get someone turned on with this one. Try, I don’t know, Trainspotting, that at least has Ewan McGregor’s dick in it.
(2) Caddyshack (dir. Harold Ramis)—1980*
Now, I know what you’re thinking—Rodney does cap the proceedings by announcing: “Hey, everybody. We’re all gonna get laid!” And yes, that is the greatest last line in a movie ever. But, reasonable as it may seem to turn to your girl after Rodney says the line and say to her, “So . . . is he right?” I would advise against. Also, this is the one movie I can think of that I have absolutely never met a woman who liked it. At all. I speak as a guy who has made out with a girl while watching Slap Shot and even—put the bullshit detector away, please—once met a girl who liked Bloodsport. So as an expert on such matters, do not, gentlemen, ask your girl to sit through Caddyshack. You will not be pleased with the results.
(2a) Fried Green Tomatoes (dir. Jon Avnet)—1991
Since the above paragraph was directed solely to men, a word for the ladies: making a guy watch this movie is like taking him shopping. Now, I’m a progressive guy, and as sophisticated a cineaste as you’re going to find anywhere (the ten “fucks” per sentence and wide-eyed fascination with explosions and car chases notwithstanding). This is a well-made movie. It’s got a terrific cast. I am not in any way shape or form knocking it as a movie. But as an experience, if you’re not a woman, this movie is not interested in you. Never mind that a guy directed it. A woman directed Point Break, after all. I had an ex put Fried Green Tomatoes on once, and she woke me up to complain that she’d wanted to watch a movie as a romantic evening together. Let the record reflect that it did not work.
(2) and (2a) are part of the same point—any movie that caters entirely to the interests of one gender fails as a date movie. Apologies for any slight to gay couples, but the same principle would apply to any movie with an aggressively and exclusively heteronormative viewpoint, or, worse, an openly homophobic one. I’d come up with a specific example, but as I said before, the only gay guy I watch a lot of movies with spends all his time trying to figure out whether Dario Argento or Takashi Miike is the greatest director of all time and I'm still persona non grata with the lesbians over shit like the Chasing Amy trolling, so I don’t really have a normal demographic sample to work with here.
(1) Knocked Up (dir. Judd Apatow)—2007
The absolute worst date movie imaginable. Forget for a second that Judd Apatow movies are all too long, and his process—building the movie around improvised scenes—inexorably leads to a loose, digressive narrative structure. Hell, John Cassavetes movies are all too long, what are you gonna do, call the cops? Forget also that in spite of at least one hilarious scene per movie (i.e. “You know how I know you’re gay?” or “Munich is going to get us laid!”) there are just as invariably excruciatingly long stretches of maudlin sentimentality or leaden moodiness in each one. That could happen to anybody, and as the man said, dying is easy, comedy’s hard. No, that’s not the worst. Hell, 40 Year Old Virgin is actually not a bad date movie, all things considered. But Knocked Up has a number of jaw-droppers in store for a couple going to see it on their first or second date:
--The whole story revolves around a fun, drunken hookup wherein the guy gets the girl pregnant. In and of itself that would make it the worst date movie ever, but it doesn’t stop there.
--All the guys are emotionally retarded pussies.
--The women don’t fare much better. Katherine Heigl’s ok, and you gotta cut her some slack for being pissed off about getting pregnant, which sucks, but holy shit Leslie Mann got stuck with a thankless part. All she does the whole movie is either scream at people or cry. She’s such a fascistic wife that Paul Rudd has to sneak off to his fantasy baseball draft like it was an adulterous affair.
--The ultimate conclusion seems to be that men are emotionally stunted boy-pupae who with the help of a woman telling them what do to, can blossom into husband-butterflies.
Now, it can be argued—probably pretty easily—that I’m overreacting, that that’s not what Judd Apatow is saying. That’s not the point (and it’s not just not the point because it’s flimsy bullshit). The clincher is: there was a lot of talk in the media when Knocked Up came out about it provoking serious conversations between couples who went to see it on dates. This is why it’s the worst date movie ever. Serious conversations???? Serious conversations are for when you’re already in a relationship. Dates are supposed to be about going out, having a good time—drinking, dancing, eating good food, having a laugh, getting in adventures, etc.—not sitting around debating the nature of gender roles in modern society.
Not only that, but the biggest problem with all the men in Knocked Up being pussies/retards/both and all the women being angry/dictatorial/pathologically vague about their wants is that, unlike (2) and (2a) where at least one person is being entertained, both of you are being insulted.
* * * *
In the end, the solution is to either date someone who likes the same kind of movies you do, trade off who gets to pick the movie, or just avoid the minefield altogether and think of something else to do. Don’t ask me what that is; if I knew I wouldn’t be writing a movie blog.
****
*(EDIT (1/11/10): The other night my friends Hope Cartelli and Jessi Gotta brought it to my attention that this is bullshit: they're both women and they both love Caddyshack. Moreover, Jessi tells me it was her mother who got her into it. So, a revision: only really cool girls like Caddyshack.)
So why am I—uniquely unqualified to discuss a normal date not only due to the above-mentioned circumstances but also my emotionally remote, self-conscious nature—talking about date movies? Because I’m talking about the worst ones. I’m talking about movies that couldn’t get you laid in a thousand years. I’m talking about movies that if you watch them at home on DVD while fucking will inspire your partner to ceasefire immediately and leave. That will cause fights. That will just make you feel ooky.
Before getting to the list proper, a couple surprise omissions:
Schindler’s List (dir. Steven Spielberg)—1993
Would be number one, but Jerry Seinfeld hooked up to it once. Sure, he and the chick he hooked up with weren’t watching it, but still. Disqualification’s a disqualification.
Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven)—1990
I hooked up to this movie once. I am, of course, a god.
* * * *
So now, the list proper:
(5) Chasing Amy (dir. Kevin Smith)—1997
This came out (ba dump bump) the middle of my freshman year at Bard College, a place where the fine tradition of collegiate lesbianism was (and, I presume, still is) devoutly observed. In spite of writer-director Kevin Smith’s best efforts, the sisters were not amused. Two of same, a couple with whom I was friendly, asked me whether I thought Chasing Amy was worth seeing. I thought about it for a second—I knew it was a really bad idea, but I’ve got troll blood pumping through my veins—and told them sure, all the controversy was just Harvey Weinstein publicity. Fast-forward to a few hours later: I’ve turned in early (in retrospect, a sign something was seriously wrong) and just fallen asleep when BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “DANNY, I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!” Apparently, the movie disturbed the two of them so much that they almost broke up three times in the car on the way home (once when one of them blamed the other for “her friend”—me—playing such a horrible prank on them, the second when the other blamed the first for being friends with me, and the third just because they were being emotional) and wanted to lecture me about how horrible and homophobic the movie was, and how men may not understand this but lesbians do not have any interest in men! Harrumph! (Postscript: one of them is now married to a man). So yeah.
Lest we assume from that anecdote that only lesbian couples will react this badly to Chasing Amy, an apparently straight woman I watched it with later told me as she rolled her eyes “you only like this because it’s about lesbians . . . god, men are all alike.” Steer clear. It also hasn't aged very well.
(4) The Hunt For Red October (dir. John McTiernan)—1990
This one’s strictly speculative, and it’s admittedly standing in for a litany of—for the purposes under discussion—interchangeable military-themed pictures, and this one wins the prize for being one of my favorites. But I can’t imagine being sober and/or remotely giving a shit and suggesting to a date that we watch this. Unless there’s some girl out there who gets all squirmy at the sound of James Earl Jones saying, “Now understand, the torpedo did not detonate, you heard it hit the hull. And I . . . was never here.” (If you do, e-mail me). The exquisite pleasures of watching fiercely intelligent men match wits, maverick Soviet sub captains evading capture and certain death from all sides, callow young CIA analysts struggling to earn the trust of veteran military men, and ultimately basking quietly in a shared victory are in completely separate categories from the exquisite pleasures of taking women to bed. Do not mix.
(3) Sid and Nancy (dir. Alex Cox)—1986
As with (4), this one is standing in for any number of movies with a similar problem, but this goes one higher on the list because while gay military nerds might get simultaneous boners to all the talk about Crazy Ivans and so forth, watching a couple get so fucked up on drugs that the guy fatally stabs the girl is not getting anyone hot. Not to mention, Pistols purists occasionally gripe about the liberties Alex Cox took with the historical record in favor of hallucinatory visuals and general narrative drive, so try and seduce them some other way. Still, that caveat aside, it’s a great movie, and endlessly quotable, but when one of the best quotes is “None of us fuck, see? Sex is ugly,” it’s maybe kind of sort just slightly advisable to not try and get someone turned on with this one. Try, I don’t know, Trainspotting, that at least has Ewan McGregor’s dick in it.
(2) Caddyshack (dir. Harold Ramis)—1980*
Now, I know what you’re thinking—Rodney does cap the proceedings by announcing: “Hey, everybody. We’re all gonna get laid!” And yes, that is the greatest last line in a movie ever. But, reasonable as it may seem to turn to your girl after Rodney says the line and say to her, “So . . . is he right?” I would advise against. Also, this is the one movie I can think of that I have absolutely never met a woman who liked it. At all. I speak as a guy who has made out with a girl while watching Slap Shot and even—put the bullshit detector away, please—once met a girl who liked Bloodsport. So as an expert on such matters, do not, gentlemen, ask your girl to sit through Caddyshack. You will not be pleased with the results.
(2a) Fried Green Tomatoes (dir. Jon Avnet)—1991
Since the above paragraph was directed solely to men, a word for the ladies: making a guy watch this movie is like taking him shopping. Now, I’m a progressive guy, and as sophisticated a cineaste as you’re going to find anywhere (the ten “fucks” per sentence and wide-eyed fascination with explosions and car chases notwithstanding). This is a well-made movie. It’s got a terrific cast. I am not in any way shape or form knocking it as a movie. But as an experience, if you’re not a woman, this movie is not interested in you. Never mind that a guy directed it. A woman directed Point Break, after all. I had an ex put Fried Green Tomatoes on once, and she woke me up to complain that she’d wanted to watch a movie as a romantic evening together. Let the record reflect that it did not work.
(2) and (2a) are part of the same point—any movie that caters entirely to the interests of one gender fails as a date movie. Apologies for any slight to gay couples, but the same principle would apply to any movie with an aggressively and exclusively heteronormative viewpoint, or, worse, an openly homophobic one. I’d come up with a specific example, but as I said before, the only gay guy I watch a lot of movies with spends all his time trying to figure out whether Dario Argento or Takashi Miike is the greatest director of all time and I'm still persona non grata with the lesbians over shit like the Chasing Amy trolling, so I don’t really have a normal demographic sample to work with here.
(1) Knocked Up (dir. Judd Apatow)—2007
The absolute worst date movie imaginable. Forget for a second that Judd Apatow movies are all too long, and his process—building the movie around improvised scenes—inexorably leads to a loose, digressive narrative structure. Hell, John Cassavetes movies are all too long, what are you gonna do, call the cops? Forget also that in spite of at least one hilarious scene per movie (i.e. “You know how I know you’re gay?” or “Munich is going to get us laid!”) there are just as invariably excruciatingly long stretches of maudlin sentimentality or leaden moodiness in each one. That could happen to anybody, and as the man said, dying is easy, comedy’s hard. No, that’s not the worst. Hell, 40 Year Old Virgin is actually not a bad date movie, all things considered. But Knocked Up has a number of jaw-droppers in store for a couple going to see it on their first or second date:
--The whole story revolves around a fun, drunken hookup wherein the guy gets the girl pregnant. In and of itself that would make it the worst date movie ever, but it doesn’t stop there.
--All the guys are emotionally retarded pussies.
--The women don’t fare much better. Katherine Heigl’s ok, and you gotta cut her some slack for being pissed off about getting pregnant, which sucks, but holy shit Leslie Mann got stuck with a thankless part. All she does the whole movie is either scream at people or cry. She’s such a fascistic wife that Paul Rudd has to sneak off to his fantasy baseball draft like it was an adulterous affair.
--The ultimate conclusion seems to be that men are emotionally stunted boy-pupae who with the help of a woman telling them what do to, can blossom into husband-butterflies.
Now, it can be argued—probably pretty easily—that I’m overreacting, that that’s not what Judd Apatow is saying. That’s not the point (and it’s not just not the point because it’s flimsy bullshit). The clincher is: there was a lot of talk in the media when Knocked Up came out about it provoking serious conversations between couples who went to see it on dates. This is why it’s the worst date movie ever. Serious conversations???? Serious conversations are for when you’re already in a relationship. Dates are supposed to be about going out, having a good time—drinking, dancing, eating good food, having a laugh, getting in adventures, etc.—not sitting around debating the nature of gender roles in modern society.
Not only that, but the biggest problem with all the men in Knocked Up being pussies/retards/both and all the women being angry/dictatorial/pathologically vague about their wants is that, unlike (2) and (2a) where at least one person is being entertained, both of you are being insulted.
* * * *
In the end, the solution is to either date someone who likes the same kind of movies you do, trade off who gets to pick the movie, or just avoid the minefield altogether and think of something else to do. Don’t ask me what that is; if I knew I wouldn’t be writing a movie blog.
****
*(EDIT (1/11/10): The other night my friends Hope Cartelli and Jessi Gotta brought it to my attention that this is bullshit: they're both women and they both love Caddyshack. Moreover, Jessi tells me it was her mother who got her into it. So, a revision: only really cool girls like Caddyshack.)
Thursday, 7 January 2010
FIVE (HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE) THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CASABLANCA
Casablanca was, arguably, the first cult classic in the cinema. Upon its 1942-3 release it got fairly enthusiastic reviews, nothing too adulatory. It won Best Picture at the Oscars, did moderately well at the box office (though it was only Warner Bros. third-most successful WWII movie). But then something weird happened: inspired by a popular 1957 screening of old movies in Cambridge, Massachussetts, an annual tradition of screening Casablanca during Finals Week started at Harvard. Other universities followed suit, and soon enough everyone was walking around quoting it and arguing about whether it or Citizen Kane was the greatest movie of all time. (Clearly, there are other contenders, but that's a debate for another time.)
Now, not far from the 70th anniversary of its release, Casablanca has assumed mythic proportions in cinema history. The endlessly quotable dialogue, Bogart in the white tux, the twinkle in Ingrid Bergman’s eyes, Claude Rains’ glib, cheerful corruption, the bad guys are Nazis . . . the mythos has substance. The size of its cult elevates it to the status of legitimate classic; at this point, enough people have seen the movie enough times that a lot of the mythos has solidified into perceived fact. But, as with anything that everyone knows, some misconceptions arise, and some important things fall through the cracks. So, as a public service, here are five things you should know about Casablanca:
1) Victor Laszlo is awesome
This warrants mention primarily because of a popular misconception—articulated by Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally—that Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) should have ended up with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) just because Humphrey Bogart’s the coolest man ever to walk the earth and they were so passionately in love. While Rick and Ilsa were clearly wild about each other, and Humphrey Bogart is the coolest man ever to walk the earth, Victor Laszlo is a great man. Maybe he doesn’t look as good in a tux, get laid as often, or have snappy comebacks as readily handy, Victor Laszlo is the leader of the Resistance. He catches a lot of heat for that conversation he has with Ilsa where he basically says he’d carry on without her; women, in particular, tend to tsk tsk at this, forgetting of course that the only reason they’re having the conversation is because Ilsa asked one of those evil lose-lose Girl Trap questions that invariably leaves everyone’s feelings hurt. But, in Victor Laszlo’s defense, he’s been spending the past few years leading the fucking Resistance against the Nazis (ahem) and hasn’t had the downtime to polish his ability with the ladies. In the end, all the “Ilsa should end up with Rick” people are the slightly older versions of the people who whined about Harry Potter not ending up with Hermione. Ilsa gets on the plane with Victor Laszlo, sorry. And he deserves her. Billy Crystal was wrong. Meg Ryan was right, it wasn’t just because she hadn’t had great sex yet.
2) Ronald Reagan was never going to be cast as Rick
I used to be under this misperception, and am greatly relieved that it turned out to be bullshit. Kind of beside the point, since Warner Bros. did have the good sense to cast Bogart, but still, Ronnie was a choad.
3) There will never be a better way to troll auteur theory advocates.
I admit this freely as a great admirer of directors. Even Andrew Sarris admitted Casablanca is “the most decisive exception to the auteur theory,” to which The New York Times' Aljean Harmetz middle-fingered “nearly every Warner Bros. picture was an exception to the auteur theory.” There’s nothing as satisfying as a good flame war, and as we all know, the level of satisfaction derived from a flame war is inversely proportional to the sense of humor of its participants; thus, a flame war between critics is usually almost as fun to watch as Casablanca.
On the other hand, Michael Curtiz shouldn’t be slept on as a director. He directed Casablanca, didn’t he?
4) Nearly everybody in the movie except Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were actually refugees from the Nazis.
Well, and Claude Rains. But for just about everybody else, it was personal.
Now, not far from the 70th anniversary of its release, Casablanca has assumed mythic proportions in cinema history. The endlessly quotable dialogue, Bogart in the white tux, the twinkle in Ingrid Bergman’s eyes, Claude Rains’ glib, cheerful corruption, the bad guys are Nazis . . . the mythos has substance. The size of its cult elevates it to the status of legitimate classic; at this point, enough people have seen the movie enough times that a lot of the mythos has solidified into perceived fact. But, as with anything that everyone knows, some misconceptions arise, and some important things fall through the cracks. So, as a public service, here are five things you should know about Casablanca:
1) Victor Laszlo is awesome
This warrants mention primarily because of a popular misconception—articulated by Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally—that Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) should have ended up with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) just because Humphrey Bogart’s the coolest man ever to walk the earth and they were so passionately in love. While Rick and Ilsa were clearly wild about each other, and Humphrey Bogart is the coolest man ever to walk the earth, Victor Laszlo is a great man. Maybe he doesn’t look as good in a tux, get laid as often, or have snappy comebacks as readily handy, Victor Laszlo is the leader of the Resistance. He catches a lot of heat for that conversation he has with Ilsa where he basically says he’d carry on without her; women, in particular, tend to tsk tsk at this, forgetting of course that the only reason they’re having the conversation is because Ilsa asked one of those evil lose-lose Girl Trap questions that invariably leaves everyone’s feelings hurt. But, in Victor Laszlo’s defense, he’s been spending the past few years leading the fucking Resistance against the Nazis (ahem) and hasn’t had the downtime to polish his ability with the ladies. In the end, all the “Ilsa should end up with Rick” people are the slightly older versions of the people who whined about Harry Potter not ending up with Hermione. Ilsa gets on the plane with Victor Laszlo, sorry. And he deserves her. Billy Crystal was wrong. Meg Ryan was right, it wasn’t just because she hadn’t had great sex yet.2) Ronald Reagan was never going to be cast as Rick
I used to be under this misperception, and am greatly relieved that it turned out to be bullshit. Kind of beside the point, since Warner Bros. did have the good sense to cast Bogart, but still, Ronnie was a choad.
3) There will never be a better way to troll auteur theory advocates.
I admit this freely as a great admirer of directors. Even Andrew Sarris admitted Casablanca is “the most decisive exception to the auteur theory,” to which The New York Times' Aljean Harmetz middle-fingered “nearly every Warner Bros. picture was an exception to the auteur theory.” There’s nothing as satisfying as a good flame war, and as we all know, the level of satisfaction derived from a flame war is inversely proportional to the sense of humor of its participants; thus, a flame war between critics is usually almost as fun to watch as Casablanca.
On the other hand, Michael Curtiz shouldn’t be slept on as a director. He directed Casablanca, didn’t he?
4) Nearly everybody in the movie except Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were actually refugees from the Nazis.
Well, and Claude Rains. But for just about everybody else, it was personal.
Conrad Veidt, who played Major Strasser, was pissed off enough about having to split Germany that he spent the whole rest of his career kicking the Nazis in the balls: “Typecast as the Nazi again? Fuck it: I’ll make this one really oily.” 
S.Z. Sakall—Carl the waiter—had three sisters die in a concentration camp. I imagine the line “Welcome to the fight. This time I know we’ll win” brought tears to a variety of eyes for a variety of reasons.5) There will never be a better movie made at a studio.
A broad statement, to be sure, but so many of the things that made Casablanca great were total accidents: four different writers working separately worked on the script, which ended up, as Roger Ebert put it “wonderfully unified and consistent”; the director was solid but never made another movie nearly this good before or after; Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo) let it be known that he felt like he was slumming and talked shit about Bogart’s acting ability, leading Ingrid Bergman to call him a “prima donna”; the famous last line was written months after production wrapped and Bogart only just barely made it in to overdub it; and there were plans to shoot another ending that literalized the next step in Rick and Louis’ “beautiful friendship”—joining a detachment of Free French on a ship invading North Africa—but David O. Selznick saved the day by ordering it not to be.
Also, due to radical changes in the role Hollywood plays in American life, and a hardened, more cynical American populace, the chances of the studios being able to make out-and-out propaganda movies again are slim to none. Clear-cut villains like the Nazis are fewer and farther between these days, even if propaganda still worked. Fox News churns out rabid bullshit that operates on the non-rational level of consciousness, but there are other media outlets providing counterpoints. Without a media working as one, or a people reacting as one, the chances of another Casablanca being made are near non-existent.
In the end, we don’t need another Casablanca. We already have one. It’s called Casablanca. And we’ll still have it, as time goes by.
A broad statement, to be sure, but so many of the things that made Casablanca great were total accidents: four different writers working separately worked on the script, which ended up, as Roger Ebert put it “wonderfully unified and consistent”; the director was solid but never made another movie nearly this good before or after; Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo) let it be known that he felt like he was slumming and talked shit about Bogart’s acting ability, leading Ingrid Bergman to call him a “prima donna”; the famous last line was written months after production wrapped and Bogart only just barely made it in to overdub it; and there were plans to shoot another ending that literalized the next step in Rick and Louis’ “beautiful friendship”—joining a detachment of Free French on a ship invading North Africa—but David O. Selznick saved the day by ordering it not to be.
Also, due to radical changes in the role Hollywood plays in American life, and a hardened, more cynical American populace, the chances of the studios being able to make out-and-out propaganda movies again are slim to none. Clear-cut villains like the Nazis are fewer and farther between these days, even if propaganda still worked. Fox News churns out rabid bullshit that operates on the non-rational level of consciousness, but there are other media outlets providing counterpoints. Without a media working as one, or a people reacting as one, the chances of another Casablanca being made are near non-existent.
In the end, we don’t need another Casablanca. We already have one. It’s called Casablanca. And we’ll still have it, as time goes by.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
THE STRANGE AND BRILLIANT CAREER OF TONY SCOTT
As a movie nerd with a cerebral streak, I spend a bit of time thinking about the different sub-species under the movie nerd umbrella. There are genre-specific nerds (horror, SF, action, et al), there are nerds who look down on anything that isn’t indie or foreign (the first cousins of those skinny assholes who sneer at you for being mainstream for liking Radiohead), there are Golden Age Hollywood nerds (a valuable resource, especially for people like me with huge gaps in their historical knowledge), and probably as many other varieties as there are people who watch movies. I’m a bit of all the above, and I have friends who fit all the above categories (the occasional snarl and knuckle crack keeps the indie fuckers polite) and we happily geek out about movies whenever we can. We disagree occasionally, but agree far more often. And one thing my nearest and dearest nerds all share is that we all absolutely adore Tony Scott.
Tony Scott spent over 20 years directing TV commercials before breaking into features in the early 80s, whereupon he became a favorite of uber-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. At first dismissed as a visually flashy hack—or, worse, “Ridley’s little brother,” which, while true, is still a slight—in the early 90s, in large part due to directing True Romance, more critics started grudgingly conceding some depth. Visually speaking, with his high-contrast lighting and six-cups-of-coffee editing style, eventually even critics who hated his pictures eventually had to concede his status as an auteur with a distinct signature.
His status or lack thereof as an auteur, however, is not what makes Tony Scott Tony Fucking Scott. The man simply makes entertaining movies, some of them the most entertaining of his era. A Tony Scott movie is not the sort of thing one discusses while sipping red wine and stroking your goatee and murmuring about “film.” Tony Scott movies are visceral experiences.
Here, for the uninitiated, is an overview of my man’s career. For the initiated, a chance to reminisce:
The Hunger (1983)
Tony’s debut feature is notable for three things—
a) his signature stylish camerawork,
b) an incongruously fucking amazing performance by David Bowie as an immortal coming to grips with his mortality and decay, deteriorating rapidly and dying rather melodramatically at the end of the first act,
c) Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon having kinky vampire sex
—but mostly only remembered for c). If it was a better movie, that would be unfortunate.
Initially, Tony wanted to adapt Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire (a hell of a “What If?” in cinema history) but the studio wanted him to direct their vampire movie, this one. One wonders if the narrative incoherence and now-legendary gratuitous lesbian scene were a result of Tony not really giving a shit: “This wasn’t the movie I really wanted to make,” or some such. Oh, well. We all have to start somewhere.
Top Gun (1986)
The first “Tony Fucking Scott” movie, and as such needs no introduction. Instead, a word from noted Tony Scott scholar Quentin Tarantino. (relevant part begins at 0:40)
And, because what is a blog if not a forum for self-indulgence, a variation on the above scene, from a play I directed in college, improvised in rehearsal by my good friend Steve Gilpin:
Clearly, there’s some “there” there. The late Don Simpson, though apparently not gay himself, claimed to borrow elements from gay culture for the signature Simpson/Bruckheimer style, though aside from Top Gun, the only gay elements I can remember in any Simpson/Bruckheimer movies are a few blatant stereotypes, like in Beverly Hills Cop when Eddie pretends to be the villain’s lover as a way to insult him by proxy.
On the other hand, Top Gun brims with gay, which depending on one’s orientation is either cause to titter insecurely or sit back and enjoy. Just about every scene has muscular naked men in towels. Kelly McGillis reveals she wants to fuck Tom Cruise by dressing as a boy. And for years, I thought that when they were saying “RIO” (radar intercept officer), they were saying “rear,” which is an easy mistake to make when one considers that Goose, the RIO, is clearly the pilot, Maverick’s, bottom. Also, lest we forget, the aforementioned half-naked volleyball scene was scored to a song called “Playing With the Boys.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding, we are discussing a classic. In college, some friends of mine and I played a Top Gun drinking game wherein we drank every time Tom Cruise was cool, which was merely an excuse for us all to down a beer in one gulp during Tom Cruise’s first scene, and having established our point symbolically, let the remainder of the game go without saying (since we, as college students, did not have enough money for the amount of beer we’d need to drink every time Tom Cruise was cool). To paraphrase another successful movie from the mid 80s, gay, in a word, is good.
Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
Completely unnecessary, shits all over the original, aggressively stupid, serves no purpose whatsoever other than to make money, notable only for a slow pan up Brigitte Neilsen’s legs, followed by Eddie’s awed question: “Damn, baby, how long does it take you to shave those legs?” Even then, Eddie kills the joke by muttering to himself “Man, that’s a big bitch,” because we didn’t get that she was tall the first time around.
Fortunately, Tony goes on to bigger and better things.
Revenge (1990)
I heard it sucks. I love Tony, but there are only so many hours in a day.
Days of Thunder (1990)
It’s stupid and loud, and I couldn’t give less of a fuck about NASCAR if I were in a coma, but Robert Duvall’s really good, you get to see an early John C. Reilly being funny (see also Grace, State of, same year), Randy Quaid tells Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall they “[look] like a monkey fuckin' a football,” it has the requisite, completely reliable Fred Dalton Thompson performance (shitty senator, great character actor), and last but not least, features the 22 year old, still-redheaded Nicole Kidman in one of the great moments of my early adolescence as an almost-plausible Australian neurosurgeon. Almost, but not quite, kind of like the movie.
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Now we’re talkin’, motherfucker. Rewritten though it may have been, it still began life as a script by the great Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) and like all of Mr. Black’s work, is the blue note to the ear of 13 year old boys of all ages. Having been a 13 yr old boy at the time of this movie’s release, I’m both completely incapable of objectivity and a passionately sincere advocate of this movie’s brilliance.
The tone is established nicely in the very first scene, a football game in a torrential rainstorm (in Los Angeles, no less) in a stadium where the lights are apparently broken. The star running back for the LA team takes a phone call from a sinister gambler, pops some pills, and takes the field for the second half, during which he breaks away for a long touchdown run that will apparently make the score what it needs to be for the sinister gambler to win his bet, except there’s a tackler in his way, so the running back (played by Tae Bo time-capsule denizen Billy Blanks) employs the age-old “pull an automatic from his skin-tight football pants where it somehow remained hidden and proceed to shoot half the defense in the head” scoring strategy. Everyone runs over to him—of course, because who would run away under such circumstances?—and Billy takes his helmet off, and in one of the greatest Bad Acting Moments of all time, says “Ain’t life a bitch?” and blows his brains out.
With the bravura opening out of the way, Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans are introduced as, respectively, an extremely low-rent wisecracking private detective and the disgraced ex-quarterback whose stripper girlfriend the detective is hired to protect. The girlfriend is machine-gunned by the bad guys, and Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans set the male-bonding process in motion by busting each other’s balls. Bruce Willis, it transpires, was a Secret Service agent who once took a bullet for the president, and Damon Wayans is battling addiction to painkillers to cope with his football injuries. Bruce Willis has a daughter who curses more than him and Damon Wayans put together, who the gay bad guy kidnaps, in a moment of unprecedented and never-again paralleled feat of Bad Guy Strategy. There’s a bit of hand-wringing about the influence professional gamblers have on pro football. Many cars go fast. Many things explode. Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans become friends, and kill all the bad guys. Everyone lives happily ever after.
To call The Last Boy Scout stupid is simultaneously accurate, beside the point, completely redundant, and fuck you. It is what it is, it succeeds perfectly in being what it is, and is thus a success. Also, historically important for being one of the first times I saw the director’s name in the opening credits of a movie and knew I was in for a good time: “Oh, Tony Scott. That means it’s good.”
True Romance (1993)
A landmark of my youth, and my favorite movie for quite some time. I hadn’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet, but when this came out, I’d read enough about this Quentin Tarantino person that I was interested. And so I went to the sadly-defunct Metropolitan on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn, sat in the first row of what used to be the balcony before they cut it up into smaller theaters, and had what ended up being a screening for my mom and me only. She never quite got what I saw in it, but goddamn I loved it.
Amazingly, it still holds up to this day. Everything that made me laugh the first time still makes me laugh just as hard now. QT’s script is wonderful, which contributed greatly to Tony finally getting some love from the critics. The cast is terrific (Brad Pitt, holding up his bong to the Mafia hitman: “Hey, you wanna . . . smoke a bowl?” The mafia guy chambers a round into his shotgun with an impatient cha-chik.Brad Pitt: “Oh . . .”). The thing that impresses me most about True Romance is how Tony, who we already knew could handle the violence with the best of them, manages to balance the pretty intense violence with a genuinely sweet love story.
Oh, True Romance. Oh, oh, oh. Verbose criticism fails me. Moving along.
Crimson Tide (1995)
An important chapter in my education about how movies were made: I had never given much thought to screenwriting credits before reading about this, how Robert Towne and the above mentioned Mr. Tarantino did uncredited rewrites (which aren’t that hard to spot: who else could have written the banter about submarine movies and the Silver Surfer other than Quentin? Is that Robert Towne I see lurking in the background of that bit where Gene Hackman discourses on the Lipazzaner stallion?)
It was also an instructive example for me on how to watch a movie. In spite of my already long-standing love for Tony Scott at the time this movie came out, I saw the name “Tony Scott” and “Jerry Bruckheimer” and thought “action movie.” So, the plot about the Russian separatists stealing nukes and threatening World War III struck me as having a fatal flaw the first time I saw this: I knew they weren’t going to launch the nukes, so I thought the conclusion was foregone and there was no point to the rest of the movie. It was only years later, catching it on cable in the middle of the night, that I realized the whole bit about the Russians and the nukes was window dressing (the fact that we only hear about them from television broadcasts and over the phone is a clue that they’re somewhere else, that where we are is where it’s at). This is a movie about Old School—Gene Hackman’s “if it’s war they want, then it’s war they shall have” bluster—versus New School—Denzel’s cautious, cerebral, more philosophic “war as an absolute last resort” viewpoint. Does the Old School Cold Warrior still have a place in a world without Soviets? Or do we still need him to kick some ass with the Russians still acting the fool? Is Denzel a pussy (blasphemy, I know . . . sorry, sir) or is the intellectual a necessary player in the military world? Now that I know what Crimson Tide’s really about, I watch it every time it comes on cable. And I learned to appreciate a movie for what it actually is, not what I want it to be.
The Fan (1996)
Didn’t see it, due to a chronic pain in the testicles that recurs whenever I see a movie where Robert De Niro does something that’s beneath him. Also, Wesley Snipes looks kind of ridiculous playing sports; if I want to see him look like a dork in a baseball uniform, I’ll watch Major League, which is supposed to be funny.
Enemy of the State (1998)
My favorite Will Smith movie. He bugs me sometimes, because he’s so effortlessly charismatic—those set-your-watch-by-them $100 million grosses aren’t an accident—that a lot of times he looks like he’s coasting to the point of boredom. Not here. He’s not exactly straining his acting muscles, but his wiseass one-liners actually work here, much in the way Philip Marlowe’s always did: as a way of hiding nervousness and vulnerability as opposed to merely being there to be there.
The story is good for letting one’s inner libertarian out for a good kvetch: the NSA is watching all of us at all times, and they’re drunk on the power that that unlimited knowledge affords them until ONE MAN . . . wait, actually two men, since Gene Hackman does all the work . . . until TWO MEN GIVE THEM A TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE. Sure, it’s a little reductive, and it assumes the typical villainous disregard for all else than personal power movies always give sinister government officials (or sinister businessmen if you’re further Left), but surveillance does need to be practiced with discretion, and the government are a bunch of fucking assholes . . .
Enemy of the State also has a nearly bottomless cast of people who were famous within 2-3 years, so even if the action flags—which it doesn’t, since this is Tony Fucking Scott—you can have fun being like, “holy shit, it’s that guy, holy shit, it’s that guy” every scene.
Spy Game (2001)
Another bit of a change for Tony, this time an action movie where the action is all diplomatic wrangling by Robert Redford to save Brad Pitt’s ass, and the story is all in flashback. Not bad, but still, when the closing credits roll you nod, say “that was interesting, but I never need to see it again” and pop The Last Boy Scout on for a good hoot and holler.
The Hire: Beat the Devil (2002)
Those fuckin' BMW films really pissed me off because they were—for the most part—really good, by directors I—for the most part—like, but they were really just car commercials when you got right down to it, no matter how cool Clive Owen is (and to calculate how cool Clive Owen is, a team of mathematicians have been working around the clock for five years to figure out how to count that high).
Tony’s actually kinda sucked, sadly. I remember the camera jerking around all over the place and James Brown doing something, but not much else. Joe Carnahan, of all people, made the best one, even if he ripped his own plot device off for the retarded ending of Smokin’ Aces (one of the larger and stinkier turds of the past couple decades).
Man on Fire (2004)
A reminder that one of the dumbest things you can do is to get Denzel pissed off at you. Only Ethan Hawke ever made it out of that predicament, and that was because Denzel, force of nature that he is, hubristically brought about his own undoing.
Although it’s way too long, and even for Tony Fuckin Scott the visual pyrotechnics are a bit excessive, watching Denzel and Dakota Fanning together is genuinely affecting. And seeing the clouds part and the Wrath of Denzel rain down upon the infidels is always fun.
Domino (2005)
Surgeon general’s warning: watching when sober can be damaging to one’s mental health. Use discretionary amounts of controlled substances for optimal viewing experience. Further warning: avoid at all costs if Keira Knightley isn’t your cup of tea, looks- or talent-wise.
Bizarrely, based on a true story (Laurence Harvey’s daughter really was a bounty hunter named Domino), but the fact that the real Domino died before the movie’s release kind of makes it hard to watch a hallucinatory, escapist tall tale based on her life where she narrowly escapes death at the end. Also, Tony is kind of pushing his luck as Tony Fucking Scott by this point; his camera moves have gotten as gratuitous as the lesbian scene in The Hunger.
Déjà Vu (2006)
This is actually a really good movie. Welcome back, Tony! Denzel plays an ATF agent who investigates a terrorist attack on a New Orleans riverboat only to find—awesomely—that he can travel back in time to prevent it from ever happening. Let’s review:
Denzel + Tony Fucking Scott + SF + New Orleans locations = yes.
The fact that it was shot in post-Katrina New Orleans doesn’t have much to do with the movie (one gets the sense the script was set in pre-Katrina New Orleans), but it adds a subtle edge to the riverboat blowing up: “Fuck, not again.” This gives a very compelling and urgent despair to Denzel’s drive to get to the bottom of things. Of course, being a movie, he falls in love with one of the victims, so now he’s not only averting the terrorist attack, he’s also saving the woman he loves.
Tony’s first foray into SF manages to be more plausible than The Last Boy Scout (admittedly, he didn’t exactly sprain anything accomplishing that), largely because he underplays the SF technology and gadgetry and focuses on the human stories. Denzel is Denzel, and let no man take his name in vain. Also, after seeing him play Jesus Christ, it was fun seeing Jim Caviezel play a right-wing lunatic. And Val Kilmer, waddling around in one of those “hey, look at me, I’m managing to have fun and pay the rent at the same time” performances is a point of interest as well.
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
Didn’t really piss me off that much when I saw it, because Tony Fucking Scott can prevail over just about any script, no matter how shitty, but then I remembered that I’m a New Yorker and that the original should be left alone. Denzel still manages to be terrific, here because he somehow manages to come across as a regular guy . . . but still not as good as he was in Inside Man, which is a couple orders of magnitude better movie than this money grab.
You made it to the end! Congratulations. Coming up from our old pal is an interesting-looking train movie called Unstoppable, with Denzel returning once more in the lead, and, sadly, a remake of The Warriors . . . set in LA. Goddammit, Tony. Don’t make me regret taking you seriously. Still, if all else fails, we still have The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, and many long hours questioning our sexuality to Top Gun.
Tony Scott spent over 20 years directing TV commercials before breaking into features in the early 80s, whereupon he became a favorite of uber-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. At first dismissed as a visually flashy hack—or, worse, “Ridley’s little brother,” which, while true, is still a slight—in the early 90s, in large part due to directing True Romance, more critics started grudgingly conceding some depth. Visually speaking, with his high-contrast lighting and six-cups-of-coffee editing style, eventually even critics who hated his pictures eventually had to concede his status as an auteur with a distinct signature.
His status or lack thereof as an auteur, however, is not what makes Tony Scott Tony Fucking Scott. The man simply makes entertaining movies, some of them the most entertaining of his era. A Tony Scott movie is not the sort of thing one discusses while sipping red wine and stroking your goatee and murmuring about “film.” Tony Scott movies are visceral experiences.
Here, for the uninitiated, is an overview of my man’s career. For the initiated, a chance to reminisce:
The Hunger (1983)
Tony’s debut feature is notable for three things—
a) his signature stylish camerawork,
b) an incongruously fucking amazing performance by David Bowie as an immortal coming to grips with his mortality and decay, deteriorating rapidly and dying rather melodramatically at the end of the first act,
c) Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon having kinky vampire sex
—but mostly only remembered for c). If it was a better movie, that would be unfortunate.
Initially, Tony wanted to adapt Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire (a hell of a “What If?” in cinema history) but the studio wanted him to direct their vampire movie, this one. One wonders if the narrative incoherence and now-legendary gratuitous lesbian scene were a result of Tony not really giving a shit: “This wasn’t the movie I really wanted to make,” or some such. Oh, well. We all have to start somewhere.
Top Gun (1986)
The first “Tony Fucking Scott” movie, and as such needs no introduction. Instead, a word from noted Tony Scott scholar Quentin Tarantino. (relevant part begins at 0:40)
And, because what is a blog if not a forum for self-indulgence, a variation on the above scene, from a play I directed in college, improvised in rehearsal by my good friend Steve Gilpin:
If you’re telling me Maverick didn’t want to fuck Goose, you are deluded. And Kelly McGillis is a well-known lesbian, so you know she was just a beard. And fuckin’, when Maverick is supposed to be out bangin’ McGillis, what’s he doing? Playing volleyball with the sweaty, half-naked Goose, Slider, and Iceman. I mean, bros before hoes is one thing, but that is some blatant homoeroticism!
Clearly, there’s some “there” there. The late Don Simpson, though apparently not gay himself, claimed to borrow elements from gay culture for the signature Simpson/Bruckheimer style, though aside from Top Gun, the only gay elements I can remember in any Simpson/Bruckheimer movies are a few blatant stereotypes, like in Beverly Hills Cop when Eddie pretends to be the villain’s lover as a way to insult him by proxy.
On the other hand, Top Gun brims with gay, which depending on one’s orientation is either cause to titter insecurely or sit back and enjoy. Just about every scene has muscular naked men in towels. Kelly McGillis reveals she wants to fuck Tom Cruise by dressing as a boy. And for years, I thought that when they were saying “RIO” (radar intercept officer), they were saying “rear,” which is an easy mistake to make when one considers that Goose, the RIO, is clearly the pilot, Maverick’s, bottom. Also, lest we forget, the aforementioned half-naked volleyball scene was scored to a song called “Playing With the Boys.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding, we are discussing a classic. In college, some friends of mine and I played a Top Gun drinking game wherein we drank every time Tom Cruise was cool, which was merely an excuse for us all to down a beer in one gulp during Tom Cruise’s first scene, and having established our point symbolically, let the remainder of the game go without saying (since we, as college students, did not have enough money for the amount of beer we’d need to drink every time Tom Cruise was cool). To paraphrase another successful movie from the mid 80s, gay, in a word, is good.
Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
Completely unnecessary, shits all over the original, aggressively stupid, serves no purpose whatsoever other than to make money, notable only for a slow pan up Brigitte Neilsen’s legs, followed by Eddie’s awed question: “Damn, baby, how long does it take you to shave those legs?” Even then, Eddie kills the joke by muttering to himself “Man, that’s a big bitch,” because we didn’t get that she was tall the first time around.
Fortunately, Tony goes on to bigger and better things.
Revenge (1990)
I heard it sucks. I love Tony, but there are only so many hours in a day.
Days of Thunder (1990)
It’s stupid and loud, and I couldn’t give less of a fuck about NASCAR if I were in a coma, but Robert Duvall’s really good, you get to see an early John C. Reilly being funny (see also Grace, State of, same year), Randy Quaid tells Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall they “[look] like a monkey fuckin' a football,” it has the requisite, completely reliable Fred Dalton Thompson performance (shitty senator, great character actor), and last but not least, features the 22 year old, still-redheaded Nicole Kidman in one of the great moments of my early adolescence as an almost-plausible Australian neurosurgeon. Almost, but not quite, kind of like the movie.
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Now we’re talkin’, motherfucker. Rewritten though it may have been, it still began life as a script by the great Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) and like all of Mr. Black’s work, is the blue note to the ear of 13 year old boys of all ages. Having been a 13 yr old boy at the time of this movie’s release, I’m both completely incapable of objectivity and a passionately sincere advocate of this movie’s brilliance.
The tone is established nicely in the very first scene, a football game in a torrential rainstorm (in Los Angeles, no less) in a stadium where the lights are apparently broken. The star running back for the LA team takes a phone call from a sinister gambler, pops some pills, and takes the field for the second half, during which he breaks away for a long touchdown run that will apparently make the score what it needs to be for the sinister gambler to win his bet, except there’s a tackler in his way, so the running back (played by Tae Bo time-capsule denizen Billy Blanks) employs the age-old “pull an automatic from his skin-tight football pants where it somehow remained hidden and proceed to shoot half the defense in the head” scoring strategy. Everyone runs over to him—of course, because who would run away under such circumstances?—and Billy takes his helmet off, and in one of the greatest Bad Acting Moments of all time, says “Ain’t life a bitch?” and blows his brains out.
With the bravura opening out of the way, Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans are introduced as, respectively, an extremely low-rent wisecracking private detective and the disgraced ex-quarterback whose stripper girlfriend the detective is hired to protect. The girlfriend is machine-gunned by the bad guys, and Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans set the male-bonding process in motion by busting each other’s balls. Bruce Willis, it transpires, was a Secret Service agent who once took a bullet for the president, and Damon Wayans is battling addiction to painkillers to cope with his football injuries. Bruce Willis has a daughter who curses more than him and Damon Wayans put together, who the gay bad guy kidnaps, in a moment of unprecedented and never-again paralleled feat of Bad Guy Strategy. There’s a bit of hand-wringing about the influence professional gamblers have on pro football. Many cars go fast. Many things explode. Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans become friends, and kill all the bad guys. Everyone lives happily ever after.
To call The Last Boy Scout stupid is simultaneously accurate, beside the point, completely redundant, and fuck you. It is what it is, it succeeds perfectly in being what it is, and is thus a success. Also, historically important for being one of the first times I saw the director’s name in the opening credits of a movie and knew I was in for a good time: “Oh, Tony Scott. That means it’s good.”
True Romance (1993)
A landmark of my youth, and my favorite movie for quite some time. I hadn’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet, but when this came out, I’d read enough about this Quentin Tarantino person that I was interested. And so I went to the sadly-defunct Metropolitan on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn, sat in the first row of what used to be the balcony before they cut it up into smaller theaters, and had what ended up being a screening for my mom and me only. She never quite got what I saw in it, but goddamn I loved it.
Amazingly, it still holds up to this day. Everything that made me laugh the first time still makes me laugh just as hard now. QT’s script is wonderful, which contributed greatly to Tony finally getting some love from the critics. The cast is terrific (Brad Pitt, holding up his bong to the Mafia hitman: “Hey, you wanna . . . smoke a bowl?” The mafia guy chambers a round into his shotgun with an impatient cha-chik.
Oh, True Romance. Oh, oh, oh. Verbose criticism fails me. Moving along.
Crimson Tide (1995)
An important chapter in my education about how movies were made: I had never given much thought to screenwriting credits before reading about this, how Robert Towne and the above mentioned Mr. Tarantino did uncredited rewrites (which aren’t that hard to spot: who else could have written the banter about submarine movies and the Silver Surfer other than Quentin? Is that Robert Towne I see lurking in the background of that bit where Gene Hackman discourses on the Lipazzaner stallion?)
It was also an instructive example for me on how to watch a movie. In spite of my already long-standing love for Tony Scott at the time this movie came out, I saw the name “Tony Scott” and “Jerry Bruckheimer” and thought “action movie.” So, the plot about the Russian separatists stealing nukes and threatening World War III struck me as having a fatal flaw the first time I saw this: I knew they weren’t going to launch the nukes, so I thought the conclusion was foregone and there was no point to the rest of the movie. It was only years later, catching it on cable in the middle of the night, that I realized the whole bit about the Russians and the nukes was window dressing (the fact that we only hear about them from television broadcasts and over the phone is a clue that they’re somewhere else, that where we are is where it’s at). This is a movie about Old School—Gene Hackman’s “if it’s war they want, then it’s war they shall have” bluster—versus New School—Denzel’s cautious, cerebral, more philosophic “war as an absolute last resort” viewpoint. Does the Old School Cold Warrior still have a place in a world without Soviets? Or do we still need him to kick some ass with the Russians still acting the fool? Is Denzel a pussy (blasphemy, I know . . . sorry, sir) or is the intellectual a necessary player in the military world? Now that I know what Crimson Tide’s really about, I watch it every time it comes on cable. And I learned to appreciate a movie for what it actually is, not what I want it to be.
The Fan (1996)
Didn’t see it, due to a chronic pain in the testicles that recurs whenever I see a movie where Robert De Niro does something that’s beneath him. Also, Wesley Snipes looks kind of ridiculous playing sports; if I want to see him look like a dork in a baseball uniform, I’ll watch Major League, which is supposed to be funny.
Enemy of the State (1998)
My favorite Will Smith movie. He bugs me sometimes, because he’s so effortlessly charismatic—those set-your-watch-by-them $100 million grosses aren’t an accident—that a lot of times he looks like he’s coasting to the point of boredom. Not here. He’s not exactly straining his acting muscles, but his wiseass one-liners actually work here, much in the way Philip Marlowe’s always did: as a way of hiding nervousness and vulnerability as opposed to merely being there to be there.
The story is good for letting one’s inner libertarian out for a good kvetch: the NSA is watching all of us at all times, and they’re drunk on the power that that unlimited knowledge affords them until ONE MAN . . . wait, actually two men, since Gene Hackman does all the work . . . until TWO MEN GIVE THEM A TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE. Sure, it’s a little reductive, and it assumes the typical villainous disregard for all else than personal power movies always give sinister government officials (or sinister businessmen if you’re further Left), but surveillance does need to be practiced with discretion, and the government are a bunch of fucking assholes . . .
Enemy of the State also has a nearly bottomless cast of people who were famous within 2-3 years, so even if the action flags—which it doesn’t, since this is Tony Fucking Scott—you can have fun being like, “holy shit, it’s that guy, holy shit, it’s that guy” every scene.
Spy Game (2001)
Another bit of a change for Tony, this time an action movie where the action is all diplomatic wrangling by Robert Redford to save Brad Pitt’s ass, and the story is all in flashback. Not bad, but still, when the closing credits roll you nod, say “that was interesting, but I never need to see it again” and pop The Last Boy Scout on for a good hoot and holler.
The Hire: Beat the Devil (2002)
Those fuckin' BMW films really pissed me off because they were—for the most part—really good, by directors I—for the most part—like, but they were really just car commercials when you got right down to it, no matter how cool Clive Owen is (and to calculate how cool Clive Owen is, a team of mathematicians have been working around the clock for five years to figure out how to count that high).
Tony’s actually kinda sucked, sadly. I remember the camera jerking around all over the place and James Brown doing something, but not much else. Joe Carnahan, of all people, made the best one, even if he ripped his own plot device off for the retarded ending of Smokin’ Aces (one of the larger and stinkier turds of the past couple decades).
Man on Fire (2004)
A reminder that one of the dumbest things you can do is to get Denzel pissed off at you. Only Ethan Hawke ever made it out of that predicament, and that was because Denzel, force of nature that he is, hubristically brought about his own undoing.
Although it’s way too long, and even for Tony Fuckin Scott the visual pyrotechnics are a bit excessive, watching Denzel and Dakota Fanning together is genuinely affecting. And seeing the clouds part and the Wrath of Denzel rain down upon the infidels is always fun.
Domino (2005)
Surgeon general’s warning: watching when sober can be damaging to one’s mental health. Use discretionary amounts of controlled substances for optimal viewing experience. Further warning: avoid at all costs if Keira Knightley isn’t your cup of tea, looks- or talent-wise.
Bizarrely, based on a true story (Laurence Harvey’s daughter really was a bounty hunter named Domino), but the fact that the real Domino died before the movie’s release kind of makes it hard to watch a hallucinatory, escapist tall tale based on her life where she narrowly escapes death at the end. Also, Tony is kind of pushing his luck as Tony Fucking Scott by this point; his camera moves have gotten as gratuitous as the lesbian scene in The Hunger.
Déjà Vu (2006)
This is actually a really good movie. Welcome back, Tony! Denzel plays an ATF agent who investigates a terrorist attack on a New Orleans riverboat only to find—awesomely—that he can travel back in time to prevent it from ever happening. Let’s review:
Denzel + Tony Fucking Scott + SF + New Orleans locations = yes.
The fact that it was shot in post-Katrina New Orleans doesn’t have much to do with the movie (one gets the sense the script was set in pre-Katrina New Orleans), but it adds a subtle edge to the riverboat blowing up: “Fuck, not again.” This gives a very compelling and urgent despair to Denzel’s drive to get to the bottom of things. Of course, being a movie, he falls in love with one of the victims, so now he’s not only averting the terrorist attack, he’s also saving the woman he loves.
Tony’s first foray into SF manages to be more plausible than The Last Boy Scout (admittedly, he didn’t exactly sprain anything accomplishing that), largely because he underplays the SF technology and gadgetry and focuses on the human stories. Denzel is Denzel, and let no man take his name in vain. Also, after seeing him play Jesus Christ, it was fun seeing Jim Caviezel play a right-wing lunatic. And Val Kilmer, waddling around in one of those “hey, look at me, I’m managing to have fun and pay the rent at the same time” performances is a point of interest as well.
The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
Didn’t really piss me off that much when I saw it, because Tony Fucking Scott can prevail over just about any script, no matter how shitty, but then I remembered that I’m a New Yorker and that the original should be left alone. Denzel still manages to be terrific, here because he somehow manages to come across as a regular guy . . . but still not as good as he was in Inside Man, which is a couple orders of magnitude better movie than this money grab.
You made it to the end! Congratulations. Coming up from our old pal is an interesting-looking train movie called Unstoppable, with Denzel returning once more in the lead, and, sadly, a remake of The Warriors . . . set in LA. Goddammit, Tony. Don’t make me regret taking you seriously. Still, if all else fails, we still have The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, and many long hours questioning our sexuality to Top Gun.
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
UNDERNEATH
“There’s something very powerful about being absent.” –Allison Elliott, The Underneath
I’m an unabashed Steven Soderbergh fan, and have been his whole career. I like the photos they used of him next to the words “mercurial” and “aloof” in the dictionary. I cheer when he has a hit. I drink when he has a flop. His career arc is an eventful one: Palme D’Or winner at 26 (at the time, the youngest winner ever), virtually out of the business at 30, Oscar-winning director of two blockbuster hits in one year at 36, and now in his 40s either the director of another hit installment in the Ocean’s Eleven series or tilting at non-linear micro-budget DV windmills. My personal history with Soderbergh’s work goes back to 1992, when my junior high acting teacher distributed a Xerox about the nationwide casting call for King of the Hill; I thought, “Hey, I’ll audition for a movie, why the hell not,” until a “friend” informed me that fat kids didn’t get parts in movies, and because my “friend” was “cool” I assumed he knew what he was talking about and didn’t go. Sigh.
Without my box-office magnetism helping out, King of the Hill ended up underperforming at the box office (grossing $1.3 million on an $8 mil budget). After the similar disappointment of Kafka, Soderbergh’s career momentum from sex, lies, and videotape had almost vanished by the time he decided remake the film noir classic Criss Cross as The Underneath. His will to direct had left him as well—he said about making The Underneath: “To sit on a movie set at age thirty-one and wonder whether you even want to do this, having no other real skills, is so terrifying and depressing. . . I was bored, I was empty, I’d just run out of gas. I felt, If I have to set up another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m just gonna shoot myself.” (source: Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind; ISBN: 0-684-86529-X). Atta boy, Steve! Positive mental attitude!
He’s since virtually disowned the resulting movie, for a variety of reasons above and beyond his gloomy mental state during production. One being that at the time it came out—April 1995—crime pictures and noir were very much in vogue due to the advent of one Quentin Tarantino. As a result, when The Underneath jumps around chronologically and in scenes like the one where an uncredited Soderbergh explains to Peter Gallagher the difference between “probable” and “doubtful” on a football injury report, one feels the shadow of QT. While unfair, it’s inevitable, kind of like being an English rock ‘n’ roll band in the mid-60s—people were going to lump you in with the Beatles no matter what you did.
Criss Cross itself had a bit of a troubled production history—the producer died during production, and Burt Lancaster subsequently got pissy when director Robert Siodmak and screenwriter Daniel Fuchs decided to shift the focus of the story from the heist to the love triangle between Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo, and Dan Duryea. (That the remake should also be a source of discontent in its creators makes ya wonder whether we’re dealing with the film noir Scottish play here).
(requisite spoiler warning)
The Underneath stars Peter Gallagher and his magnificent eyebrows as Michael Chambers, a compulsive gambler who’s cleaned up his act and is returning to his hometown, Austin, Texas, for his mother’s wedding. On the bus on the way into town he meets and hits it off with a pretty young woman (the very pretty indeed Elisabeth Shue) who’s just starting work as a bank teller. They exchange numbers. When Michael gets home he meets the guy his mother’s marrying (Paul Dooley), who offers him a job driving an armored car (which, in the opening shot of the movie, Peter Gallagher is driving with Dooley in the passenger seat). Michael’s cop brother (Adam Trese) tells him that his ex-girlfriend is still around, and dating “some hood.” Michael says, “I’m just here for the wedding,” but of course in the next scene he’s pursuing his ex Rachel (Allison Elliott) at a bar, and meeting her new boyfriend Tommy, the aforementioned “hood” (William Fichtner, even more caffeinated than he usually is).
This is all established within the first 15 minutes. We spend the next 40 revisiting Michael’s past as a chronic gambler and how it torpedoed his relationship with Rachel, all while in the present day he’s trying to get back with her, much to his cop brother’s disapproval. The heist, to which we’ve been flashing forward periodically for the whole movie, isn’t even proposed until the 54 minute mark, almost two-thirds of the way in, as a means for Michael to avoid being killed by Tommy for messing around with Rachel. This is the point where the intriguing, well-acted family drama transitions into the slightly less plausible world of the heist thriller, but fortunately it stays intriguing and well-acted.
The heist itself, arranged by an anonymous figure who the scary-in-his-own-right Tommy professes to find scary, does not go well. Michael, as an armored-truck driver, is to act as an inside man, and anonymous gunmen are to relieve him on the truck’s contents, which Michael speculates may contain as much as a million dollars in cash (it ends up being a million three). But, Paul Dooley insists on riding with Michael. The bank at which they decide to rob the armored car is the one where Elisabeth Shue works, and she comes down to meet the armored truck at just the wrong time. Michael, trying to protect both Elisabeth Shue and Paul Dooley at the same time, gets shot, and Paul Dooley gets killed (what sick son of a bitch would do such a thing to Paul Dooley is not revealed—the heist guys’ faces stay obscured). Michael becomes a bit of a hero in the media for nobly though unsuccessfully defending the truck. He ends up laid up in the hospital, where he’s visited by his distraught mother, a suspicious, recently-interrogated Elisabeth Shue, the cops who interrogated Elisabeth Shue, the president of the armored truck company (Joe Don Baker), and the cop brother, who is convinced that Michael is the inside man and informs him that his police protection has been pulled, since “who would want to kill a hero?” Sure enough, Tommy sends a guy to the hospital to abduct Michael, who brings him out to a remote cabin where, in short order a) the errand boy is killed, b) Rachel engineers things so Michael can get his hands on a gun, c) Michael shoots Tommy, d) Tommy, not quite dead, knocks Michael out of his wheelchair before Michael shoots him a second, fatal time, and e) Rachel gives Michael a speech about the joys of being emotionally and physically remote before leaving with all the money. The movie ends with Rachel buying a scratch-off lottery ticket at a gas station, as Joe Don Baker follows her into the night (whether to ambush her and recover his money, or because he’s in on the whole scam remains ambiguous).
There are a lot of interesting elements in The Underneath. The lottery ticket business recurs throughout the movie, with Rachel auditioning to be the girl who calls the lottery numbers on TV, and Michael’s mother compulsively playing the lottery, as a way to get rich quickly without having to work for it, much like the armored-car heist. The idea of shooting different narrative strands with different tints and film stocks to make them readily distinguishable that Soderbergh later employed in Traffic originated here, with the flashforwards to Michael driving the armored car in a neon green, all the scenes where he’s trying to reconnect with Rachel in an icy blue, and a multicolored window in Michael’s mother’s house through which Michael, photographed from different angles, ponders different things.
On the other hand, there are other things that make one understand Soderbergh’s dissatisfaction with the movie. It’s a heist movie where you don’t realize it’s a heist movie until it’s almost over. The hospital sequence, where Michael is laid up in bed while everyone comes in to chat, is shot first-person from his perspective for a little flash and rambles on forever before getting to the point, making it kind of a fractal for the whole movie. And, much as the quote I prefaced this post with implies, it’s not the warmest of movies. In fact, all of these elements make The Underneath the perfect Soderbergh picture for its detractors: a whole lot of visual flash, but a mess story-wise and so cold your tongue could get stuck to it.
So why, you may ask yourself, have I gone on at such length about it, and furthermore, even more confusingly, why do I like it? The latter is something I can’t explain and don’t particularly want to, aside from the fact that flashy camerawork and shit like matching edits by color rather than continuity work on me the way fake tits work on other men. The former, though, I will explain. Coming as it did at a low ebb in Soderbergh’s career, the failure of The Underneath made him hit rock bottom creatively and personally. He followed it with an absolutely batshit insane picture called Schizopolis, which renewed his will to direct and—bizarrely—led to an old friend of his at Universal offering him the chance to direct Out of Sight, which in a way was his second debut, and inaugurated the style he’s been working in ever since.
All the pieces matter, ladies and gentlemen. A director’s failures are sometimes even more characteristic of his/her vision—not to mention even more important career-wise—than the successes. And, a good director’s worst pictures are usually better than a bad director’s best.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT
What better way to start off the newly minted year than with an unnecessary sequel? What, after all, is a new year? Expensive, the same damn thing all over again, no one ever likes it as much . . .
I’ve never had anything against sequels as sequels. Some of them have their moments: the late Heath Ledger’s terrifyingly inscrutable Joker, the revelation of Luke Skywalker’s parentage, Frankie Pentangeli testifying at the Kefauver hearings, South African drug dealers hiding behind diplomatic immunity, John Amos’ legendary “We’re here to jerk off this cocksucker ‘til he tries to take off . . . period!” When there’s a story to extend, by all means, do so. And, lest we all forget, the movie business is a business, and proven commodities are wise investments.
Some sequels, though, require a more expansive and tolerant mindset to appreciate. I’m not necessarily talking about sequels that flat-out suck, since expansiveness and tolerance shouldn’t be masochistic. But there are movies that feel complete as they are, that upon ending leave no apparent room to continue. Or say all that there is to say on the subject. One such movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Famously born of a proposition made by Stanley Kubrick in a letter to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that they collaborate on the “proverbial good science fiction movie,” 2001 took four years and a then-ludicrous amount of money to make, and upon its release in 1968 revolutionized cinematic special effects—Star Wars, for one widely loved example, would not exist without the innovations made by Kubrick and his crew—and, fortunately for the blood pressure of the executives at MGM, made back its no-longer-quite-so-ludicrous budget and then some.
That last I mention only because holy shit, there has never been a weirder commercial hit in the history of cinema. It’s two hours and twenty minutes long, there’s dialogue for about five of those minutes, the whole first half hour or so is about monkeys being taught how to beat the fuck out of each other by a giant black monolith, which has a twin on the moon that people later find, and another much bigger one out by Jupiter that a couple very taciturn astronauts who like taking long, slow jogs in artificial gravity are sent to investigate, only their neurotic computer tries to kill them, leading the more taciturn of the two—the only survivor—to take a closer look, whereupon aliens give him LSD and he turns into a baby orbiting the earth. It’s a great movie to smoke weed to for this reason. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense; it’s simply one of the most expensive experimental films ever made. And it sure as shit is a film, not a movie.
Arthur C. Clarke, having written the novel 2001 while Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay, decided to write a sequel to the novel, which incorporated elements of the movie (such as the movie being set, for simplicity’s sake, at Jupiter; the location fees to shoot on Saturn are a little high, and Jupiter gives great tax breaks to film companies). The novel was a hit, and pretty damn good besides, so MGM decided to do it up. Kubrick passed, so Peter Hyams signed on to write, produce, and direct (he was also his own DP).
Peter Hyams’ previous picture was the wildly underrated guilty pleasure Outland, with Sean Connery as a good cop in a mining colony out in the asteroid belt who finds out that Peter Boyle’s been selling space crack to the miners to keep them working longer hours (but space crack, like its earthly counterpart, kills) and takes his ass down with Frances Sternhagen’s reluctant help. Hyams had also, previously, made a good little SF picture called Capricorn One, so he was a logical hire, and though he mystifyingly started directing Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in the 90s, a decade earlier he had a good feel for middle-brow SF. And Outland, in particular, hasn’t dated a bit. I’d go as far as to say that if it had been released 10-15 years later exactly as is it would have done even better.
2010, though, was one of countless movies that lost its raison d’etre with the end of the Cold War. It opens, in one of the most courteous acts of heresy on record, by literalizing, in a series of tersely-worded title cards, the Jupiter mission segment of 2001 (the homicidal computer, the mission commander who disconnected him, and then disappeared, leaving the spaceship a derelict orbiting Jupiter’s moon Io), and then presenting the main dramatic conflict of the story: if the Americans want to find out what happened to their lost spaceship before it crashes into Io, they need to hitch a ride with the Soviets. Careful students of current events will note that there has been no Soviet Union since 1991. (Humorously, the movie also contains a TV ad for Pan Am, which similarly went tits up the same year). As the Soviet Union passed, so did the entire once-robust genre of Cold War stories. The main casualties, genre-wise, were espionage fiction and SF. SF in particular took a major hit. For the previous 45 years, SF writers had been projecting futures in which the US-Soviet conflict was still raging strong, which was hardly their fault. The old farts among us remember all too well that when the Cold War was on, it felt as though it would rage on eternally. So, the fact that the entire dramatic conflict in the movie until the last half-hour—when the aliens pop by to say how do and by the way would you fuck off back to Earth so you don’t get killed—is an anachronism is no one’s fault.
Hyams did exacerbate the problem slightly in his adaptation, though. Clarke’s novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, except that the Russian guy who comes out to chat with Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) at the Arecibo telescopes in Puerto Rico in the opening scene is an old buddy of his, and the reason he’s there telling Floyd that Discovery is going to crash into Io is because he thinks his old friend Floyd will want to go to personally atone for having been responsible for the whole HAL clusterfuck in the first place (Floyd being the bureaucrat who gave the computer conflicting orders about who to tell what about the monolith and the aliens, leading to the computer going apeshit and trying to kill everyone). The Russians are more than happy to have the Americans along to help, since they want to know exactly what the hell happened. Clearly, in the novel, political tensions have eased to the point where, though the Russians are still called Soviets, they’re no longer inscrutable foes, they’re dorks like you and me but with varying degrees of goofiness to their accents. Interestingly, in the novel, the Chinese are the wild card in the mix, much like today.
But since a movie is not a novel, we had a tenser U.S.-Soviet situation in our hypothetical 2010. And since the subplot about the Chinese being the ones who found chlorophyll on ice-bound Jupiter satellite Europa would have taken too long to explain, it’s jettisoned. And Floyd’s wife, who still doesn’t like the fact that he splits to chase aliens for five years, doesn’t divorce him. This is all well and good, since a movie is not a novel. Even changing the Indian computer guy who invented HAL to a white guy isn’t that big a deal—cinematic racial semiotics being what they are, you’re going to get called racist if the computer guy has an Indian accent, and you’re going to get called a racist if you cast a white guy. So, if you’re fucked either way, you might as well just put it out of mind and cast Bob Balaban, because he’ll be icy, poorly socialized, and clearly intelligent, like all good computer guys.
If you’re armed with the expansiveness and tolerance I mentioned earlier, 2010 hums along just fine. The scene when astronaut-turned-alien David Bowman (Keir Dullea) shows up and freaks Roy Scheider out as he passes on the ambiguously worded “get the fuck out now” message from the aliens works nicely, in large part because Keir Dullea, in 1984, looks damn near exactly the same as he did when the original was shot in 1965, which is a little unnerving.
However, the ending, as endings so often do, sucks. It’s one thing to have a traditional three-act structure, or dialogue, or characters with motivations and humanity other than HAL, or cute little “hey, this Russian guy laughs at the same dumb jokes as I do” moments, all of these things malign the memory of the original . . . but when the aliens use the monolith to blow up Jupiter and turn it into a sun (not the dumb part) and the humans are safely on their way home because Roy Scheider, a government bureaucrat, comes up with a wildly complicated scheme (that in the book, John Lithgow's character, an actual scientist, comes up with) involving binding the American and Soviet spaceships together where HAL ultimately blows up and takes one for the team actually works (again, not the dumb part, in spite of the heavy-handed “we can accomplish more by working with each other than against each other” imagery and the whole thing about the flawed character redeeming himself through martyrdom), they send the people a fucking text message that says “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.” Whhhhhhhhhaaaaatthefuck.
Now, in the book, that whole bit kind of works for the following two reasons: one, there’s a nice little scene where David Bowman reunites with HAL and Bowman explains if HAL helps him send a message to the humans, HAL doesn’t have to take one for the team. HAL happily agrees, and Bowman uses alien magic to take HAL with him. (Ultimately, HAL’s all right—he freaks out under stress but he’s a pretty good guy for a computer). And two, the message Bowman has HAL send doesn’t have the stupid fucking last two sentences in it. Aliens do not give a shit about the Cold War. The alien in The Day The Earth Stood Still did, but all that proves is that aliens can be hippie nerds too. However, aliens with balls big enough to blow up Jupiter and turn it into a sun are not hippies (though they clearly needed some nerds to handle logistics), nor are they liberals. Blowing up planets, by definition, is not eco-friendly. Right wing aliens aren’t going to give you anything to use in peace. Right wing aliens say “fuck off. Earth can suck my dick.”
Still, in spite of its flaws, its high standing in many questionable aesthetic, moral, and intellectual categories, and its obsolescence as relevant SF, I get a kick out of 2010. My dad took me to see it in the theater when it came out, bought me the book, geeked out about it with me, the whole nine. It was my favorite movie for a while, until something else came out, and even 2001 was never my favorite movie (not even the time a friend of mine and I smoked an eighth to it and I was convinced HAL had hacked into my laptop and was watching me with it so I had to throw a couple sweatshirts over it until the movie was over). Like any good—by which I mean bad—SF movie, the computers have flashing lights. The more flashing lights a computer has, the more powerful it is. And, lest we forget, a young Helen Mirren plays the Soviet spaceship captain. Young Helen Mirren was something else, man.
Hopefully, the movie 2010, as a well-produced but kind of pointless endeavor that trucks along okay until a fucktarded ending, won’t be a harbinger of the year 2010. I’m a little worried, because 2001 turned out to be eerily spot on—weird, druggy, kind of slow, went batshit crazy toward the end. Fingers crossed.
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